Satya Nadella reveals what he would do if he ever quit Microsoft: 'Would love to find some domain...'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about using a metric used to measure efficiency of AI models to improve healthcare and education sectors.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has spent 34 years working with the tech giant. And each year he said he felt more excited about being at Microsoft as opposed to thinking of himself as just an employee of the company. But, if he ever had to quit the company, what would he do next? When Nadella was asked this question at a recent podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel, his first instinct was to reply that he would never leave Microsoft.

A couple of seconds later, however, he reconsidered and said that he would work with "tokens per watt per dollar"--a metric that’s reshaping AI efficiency--in sectors such as health, education, and public sector institutions.

"If you did leave Microsoft, what company would you start?" Patel asked. "Company I would start...? Man, that's where the company man in me says that I'll never leave Microsoft," Nadella said, before adding that technology is the greatest democratising force.

"I feel like finally, we have that ability. If you say those tokens per dollar per watt is what we can generate, I would love to find some domain in which that can be applied, where it is so underserved. That's where healthcare, education... Public sector would be another place," the Microsoft CEO said. "If you take those domains, which are the underserved places, where my life as a citizen of this country or a member of this society or anywhere, would I be better off if somehow all this abundance translated into better healthcare, better education, and better public sector institutions serving me as a citizen? That would be a place."

What is 'Tokens Per Dollar Per Watt' (TPDW)?

Satya Nadella had introduced the term at a Microsoft event in January as a metric that can define AI efficiency. Tokens stand for the amount of work an AI model accomplishes such as generating responses, dollar is the cost of running that AI model, and watt is the energy the model consumes to deliver those results.

The Microsoft CEO himself called TPDW "the sweet spot where energy, compute power, and intelligence meet—will be a game-changing formula for driving GDP growth".

Speaking about why TPDW should also be an indicator of economic growth, Nadella said, "To me, the driver of economic growth, which I think is the ultimate goal of any general-purpose technology, is to be able to bring together this nexus between computer and energy and it's best captured by this formula. Being able to create intelligence in the most efficient way in terms of power consumption and the dollars spent is the ultimate measure with which you can then as a country or a company turn the factor of production into real productivity with its education and health outcomes."

Nadella also said that TPDW would allow multinational companies to become more competitive worldwide.